Mobile phone and cell provider T-Mobile, the fourth-largest cell provider in the United States, reported today that the social security numbers, birthdays, addresses, and other personal information of 15 million of its customers were stolen by hackers. The…
For almost four decades now, we’ve relied on public-key encryption to secure the keys we use to encrypt our data. The most popular form of public-key encryption, RSA, depends entirely on how difficult it is…
Sometimes design mistakes are so dumb that, if you’re conspiracy-minded, you wonder if they were made on purpose. Here’s an example. HTC, makers of the One Max smartphone, decided to leave users’ fingerprints in a world-readable,…
Two students in the Department of Computer and Mathematical Sciences (CaMS) at Lewis University participated in the University’s Summer Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) this summer. Betsy Langland and Michael Korzon, both of Downers Grove, presented…
It turns out that Microsoft has been right all along, at least when it comes to software updates. Android has it very, very wrong. And Apple, in its quest to rule everything, got it right out…
An article in The Washington Post today presented some scary but unsurprising news about recent advances in hacking into automobiles to take control of them remotely. From several miles away, an attacker could break into the…
Securing data isn’t easy. If it were, then attacks like this one wouldn’t be occurring so regularly. The fact of the matter is that so much time, effort, and money are spent trying to secure the…
A hacker group known as Lizard Squad made a lot of kids unhappy this Christmas by shutting down two popular video game networks, Microsoft’s Xbox Live and Sony’s Playstation Network. Starting on Christmas eve, core…
A laptop containing data on 2,800 patients at Northwestern Memorial Health Care was stolen this week. According to a report, the laptop was password-protected but not encrypted. Put simply, that means that 2,800 student records are…
The Sony hacking scandal in the wake of the comedy The Interview is alarming, not because it has caused the demise of a single movie, but because it suggests that, unless we get a dose of…